The air pollution level is increasing globally at an alarming rate. In the last two decades, many cities have adopted policies to control the emission of pollutants to the atmosphere as well as to promote sustainable urban developments. However, many of these initiatives have concluded that a long term success would require investing in the environmental literacy of the general population. In this context, we have developed USC AiR, an Augmented Reality (AR) environmental data visualization mobile application which communicates with IoT air quality sensors placed by the USC community throughout the campus and displays the real-time data as interactive visualizations. The USC AiR mobile application, utilizes the Intelligent Integrated IoT (I3) smart campus platform to send and receive real-time data between the air quality sensors and the AR mobile application. USC AiR allows users to report alarming air quality conditions to social media and recommend environmental interventions such as planting trees for CO2 absorption. Our project is currently utilizing several outdoor and indoor static air quality sensors with wifi capability which have been distributed by our team. Our platform has the capability to scale up and host a large number of static and dynamic pollution sensors. This will allow us to fully engage with the campus and neighborhood communities, as well as begin conversations with the city officials that could inform urban environmental policies. We fully believe that the integration of location-based AR for air quality monitoring enables the citizens to become more engaged with the air quality data while encouraging them to contribute to the reduction of anthropogenic air pollutants.
Project Video: https://vimeo.com/332487423
Team:
Lead Concept / Technical / Graphical Developer: Biayna Bogosian PhD.c. Media Arts and Practice, USC School of Cinematic Arts
Lead IoT and Sensor Technology Developer: Dr. Gowri Sankar Ramachandran, USC Viterbi Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Lead Unity Developer: Harsh Tyagi, USC Viterbi Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Initial Unity Developer: Kunal Vasudeva , USC Viterbi Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Previous Contributors from USC Viterbi Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Dr. Vangelis Lympouridis, Prof. Michael Zyda, Sushanth Ikshwaku, Shubhesh Amidwar, Jay Patel, Lavanya Malladi, Rohan Doddaiah Shylaja, Nishant Revur
Advisors:
Prof. Scott Fisher, USC School of Cinematic Arts
Prof. Bhaskar Krishnamachari, USC Viterbi Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering